Storyblok is a headless CMS product. As opposed to using WordPress, companies need a more sophisticated platform to host their website and content. This pricing teardown is to understand where the PLG signals are, how to activate customers to upgrade, and drive revenue.

For PLG companies, the pricing page is a business model diagram (shows how the business believes it will make money) and the operational routing layer that decides who gets self-serve purchase and who gets human-assisted.

The goal here is not to say Storyblok’s pricing is right or wrong, but to understand the PLG and PLS business model logic behind it and what a Head of PLG can do with it.

In a Product-Led Growth model, the pricing page replaces the first 15 minutes of a sales qualification call. Transparency creates predictability. PLG buyers (often developers or product managers) are risk-averse regarding "lock-in." If they can’t see what success costs, they won't even start. By listing the product parameters upfront, Storyblok answers the customer's silent question: "If this project succeeds and we scale to 1 million users, what would it cost me?"

Transparent pricing aligns with the core PLG promise: Try before you buy, and know what you’ll pay before you scale.

Sometimes the pricing plan "fences" between each tier can feel strict or limiting. As one Storyblok customer noted on Reddit: "Just built a project on it. It’s not bad, but hiding some really basic functionality … behind insanely expensive tiers, is wild to me." Source: Reddit.

Patrick Campbell’s (Price Intelligently/Paddle) core idea is that great pricing uses a value metric that scales with customer outcomes, and then wraps tiers around that metric to guide expansion instead of surprising people with random cliffs.

"If you don't have a value metric, you're not charging for value. You're charging for access." — Patrick Campbell

Storyblok’s value metrics are a hybrid of multiple limits that create a "squeeze" from free → paid → sales-assisted:

By mixing these, Storyblok captures most customer profiles, whether it’s a small team with huge traffic pays through the "consumption squeeze”, or a large corporate team with low traffic pays via the “workflow and governance squeeze.”

Let’s first understand what tier customers start at, the purpose of each tier, and why customers upgrade.

A front-end dev or small tiger team proves out “Next.js + Storyblok” and shows it to one collaborator. Get the technical champion validate the technical stack.

Starter is optimized for activation. It has 1 included user (hard cap at 2). Tight limits on traffic, API calls, and locales. No ability to buy more traffic or locales.

Inviting the next stakeholder, the Marketing team, is the trigger to move up the next pricing tier.

The Developer invites a Marketer to the prototype. The Marketer falls in love with the Visual Editor. This triggers the "Aha!" moment. Both customers’ stakeholders approve.

Growth tier is the first “real” plan: 5 included seats, 2 locales included. Customers can buy overages (extra traffic, locales).

Storyblok allows you to “patch” the upgrade with add-ons for a while. But that is the squeeze… Eventually, the cost and complexity of add-ons make consideration to jump to the next tier, Growth Plus ($349/mo). But most customers would try to sit on this Growth tier ($99/mo) until they cannot.

The real cliffs between Growth and Growth Plus aren’t seats, traffic, or locales. These levers all have add-ons. The hard walls are Stories and Assets, which have fixed maximums on Growth and expand significantly on Growth Plus.

These limits caught customers by surprise. Reddit user described the asset limit as a trap door: "It starts at $99 and jumps straight to $349 if you surpass the asset threshold... basically one image file over the threshold and your price goes up 250 euros." This case has then been resolve by Storyblok reaching out to this legacy customer. Source: Reddit.

Customers feel these cliffs. The upgrade trigger here is often forced by limitation rather than value-driven.

The Growth Plus tier's biggest levers are 15 seats, 10 locales, and an increase in assets and stories. The narrative for this tier is more like a “Scale-up” plan, when customers outgrow their limits on assets and stories.

The Growth Plus plan ($349/mo) is also a "waiting room" for companies that are too big for $99/mo but not yet worried about enterprise-level governance.

Here, the value metric changes entirely. Customers are not paying for GBs or seats. Customers are paying for risk reduction and control.

SSO / identity integrations Custom roles and workflows, release management and pipelines, managed backup frequency & retention, higher uptime SLAs, support, and security options

This aligns with Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt’s concept of "Fencing." He argues that Enterprise tiers should not just be "more of the same," but should be fenced around a specific Job to be Done.

In this case, the "Job to be Done" shifts from "Build a Website" (Growth) to "Protect the Organization" (Enterprise).

PQL (Product Qualified Lead) work is about finding moments where product behavior signals readiness for a bigger conversation. We need to identify specific actions that correlate with an increased Willingness to Pay.

Below are the key transitions in Storyblok’s funnel:

Capture high-volume asset users and scaling teams

Get customers to go from scaling to governance.

Some customers will never care about $349 vs $99. They care about whether the platform can pass an audit or support a complex org structure.

PQL patterns include high-value domains (Fortune 500) or questions about SSO/SLA/Hosting Location. Route immediately to Sales. Do not nurture.

Right now, Growth Plus ($349/mo) has an identity crisis. It doesn’t have the qualitative features of Enterprise (SSO, Custom Roles) but costs 3.5x more than Growth ($99). It is just a "Bigger Bucket" of limits.

Most customers would want to start at Growth ($99/mo) with add-ons. Until the bill of having add-ons surpasses Growth Plus ($349/mo), there is no reason to begin at Growth Plus. “The place you land when add-ons get too expensive.”

Today, some users perceive Growth Plus as something they are “pushed into” rather than choose, especially when limits (like assets and stories) force an upgrade from $99/mo to $349/mo.

That’s a classic pattern Patrick Campbell warns against: tiers perceived as pure monetization, not new value.

Reposition Growth Plus as the “Workflow Tier.” Move Content Staging, and Approval Workflows from the Custom Enterprise plan down to Growth Plus.

By wrapping Workflow Features (Staging/Approvals) into the Growth Plus tier, we transform it from a "Storage Tax” (limit on Assets and Stories) into a "Workflow Standard." Teams will start here or upgrade to proactively to protect their brand, not just to store more image JPEGs.

Read more about the Secret Pricing & Packaging Framework: "Restaurant menu" for PLG:

Premium/Elite is about security and risk management. Incorporate a PQL score for accounts based on this JTBD:

When an account has a high "Governance Score" but is still on the $99 plan, that is the hottest lead. They are an Enterprise company hiding in a cheap plan.

Not everything can be captured using product signals. Use the Sales team to validate the PQL hypothesis.

Outreach and ask, "I see you're managing 3 different brands on one space. Usually, teams like yours move to a 'Risk-Managed' setup to prevent cross-brand errors. Open to a chat?"

We are selling reassurance in security and governance, beyond hitting limits like gigabytes.

This article is about a pricing teardown to understand the PLG motion of a company. How it compares to headless CMS competitors like Sanity.

Sanity acts like a "Developer's Database." You pay for volume (Bandwidth, Requests). Locales are free and unlimited because they are treated as simple data fields, and you build the UI yourself. The business model is more like an AWS-style consumption bill as you scale.

See my article on Usage-Based Pricing in PLG and the Land & Expand PLG model.

Storyblok acts like a "Marketer's Page Builder." You pay for Complexity (Seats, Locales). Pay for Locales because Storyblok provides a pre-built Visual Interface that saves marketers time. The trade-off is hitting "Plan Cliffs" when you grow your team or market reach.

Storyblok charges a premium because they solve the UI problem for marketers. Sanity is cheaper to start because they do not offer a UI.

Is the cliff helping us generate more revenue, or is it potentially creating unhappy customers and, more potential churn? Is it about ramping customers up with add-on’s, or is it about gating to hit the next tier?

When customers on the $99/mo plan hit their "Asset Limit" cap, they face a steep $349/mo (+$250/mo) jump to the next tier. If there is a conversion of 10% upgrade rate while keeping churn below 5%, then the math is positive.

The Math:

With the proposal to have an Asset Add-on, and assume 40% of customers would purchase at $20/mo, with 1% churn.

The Add-on Math:

In this hypothetical, the Hard Cliff wins ($2,005 vs $701). This explains why Storyblok keeps the asset limit as a hard wall. It forces enough upgrades to outweigh the churn. You would only switch to Add-ons if the "Cliff Churn" was massive (e.g., >20%) or the "Upgrade Rate" was tiny (<2%).

With Patrick Campbell’s framework regarding "Ramps" vs. "Fences”, the core value metrics (like Traffic and Seats) should act as ramps that scale smoothly, while binary features (like SSO) act as fences.

The danger zone for Storyblok lies in "Lopsided Usage."

If data shows that customers upgrade to the $349 tier solely for Assets, while leaving the extra seats and locales unused, you are not capturing value; you are generating resentment. These customers feel they are paying for a banquet just to get one specific dish. This "grudge spend" is a leading indicator of long-term churn, suggesting that Asset Limits should be softened with an à la carte add-on rather than acting as a hard wall.

Storyblok’s pricing model is a study in balancing two distinct forces:

The job of a Head of PLG is not to remove the friction, but to optimize when it appears. Consumption limits should remain invisible to early-stage builders but become obvious, rational steps for scaling teams. Meanwhile, Maturity Signals—like requests for SSO, custom roles, or backup retention—must be instantly caught and routed to a human. These signals indicate a customer who is ready to buy Risk Reduction, not just more features. By mastering this handoff between product-led limits and sales-led value, Storyblok can turn its "Mid-Market Sandwich" into a highly efficient engine for enterprise expansion.

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I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. 2x Founder. Product Led Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.